Farewell to Frisco, say hello to San Fran

Updated 2:04 pm, Friday, November 8, 2013

Kenneth Thomas of Hillsboro, Ore., checks out the "Racing on the Bay Frisco Style" exhibit at the Maritime Museum.

Kenneth Thomas of Hillsboro, Ore., checks out the "Racing on the Bay Frisco Style" exhibit at the Maritime Museum.

Photo: Sarah Rice, Special To The Chronicle

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Richard Everett curated the Racing on the Bay Frisco Style exhibit, shown at the Maritime Museum in San Francisco, Calif., Friday, August 23, 2013. Everett is in favor of the idea of rebranding San Francisco as Frisco. less

Richard Everett curated the Racing on the Bay Frisco Style exhibit, shown at the Maritime Museum in San Francisco, Calif., Friday, August 23, 2013. Everett is in favor of the idea of rebranding San Francisco ... more

Photo: Sarah Rice, Special To The Chronicle

Image 3 of 6

Richard Everett curated the Racing on the Bay Frisco Style exhibit, shown at the Maritime Museum in San Francisco, Calif., Friday, August 23, 2013. Everett is in favor of the idea of rebranding San Francisco as Frisco. less

Richard Everett curated the Racing on the Bay Frisco Style exhibit, shown at the Maritime Museum in San Francisco, Calif., Friday, August 23, 2013. Everett is in favor of the idea of rebranding San Francisco ... more

Photo: Sarah Rice, Special To The Chronicle

Image 4 of 6

Richard Everett curated the Racing on the Bay Frisco Style exhibit, shown at the Maritime Museum in San Francisco, Calif., Friday, August 23, 2013. Everett is in favor of the idea of rebranding San Francisco as Frisco. less

Richard Everett curated the Racing on the Bay Frisco Style exhibit, shown at the Maritime Museum in San Francisco, Calif., Friday, August 23, 2013. Everett is in favor of the idea of rebranding San Francisco ... more

Photo: Sarah Rice, Special To The Chronicle

Image 5 of 6

Richard Everett curated the Racing on the Bay Frisco Style exhibit, shown at the Maritime Museum in San Francisco, Calif., Friday, August 23, 2013. Everett is in favor of the idea of rebranding San Francisco as Frisco. less

Richard Everett curated the Racing on the Bay Frisco Style exhibit, shown at the Maritime Museum in San Francisco, Calif., Friday, August 23, 2013. Everett is in favor of the idea of rebranding San Francisco ... more

Photo: Sarah Rice, Special To The Chronicle

Image 6 of 6

Richard Everett curated the Racing on the Bay Frisco Style exhibit, shown at the Maritime Museum in San Francisco, Calif., Friday, August 23, 2013. Everett is in favor of the idea of rebranding San Francisco as Frisco. less

Richard Everett curated the Racing on the Bay Frisco Style exhibit, shown at the Maritime Museum in San Francisco, Calif., Friday, August 23, 2013. Everett is in favor of the idea of rebranding San Francisco ... more

Photo: Sarah Rice, Special To The Chronicle

Farewell to Frisco, say hello to San Fran

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We found a curious and furious message on our telephone voice mail the other day. A lady said she had been in the beautiful Art Deco Maritime Museum building and discovered an exhibit titled "Racing on the Bay Frisco Style."

Perhaps she had a complaint about the America's Cup races? But that wasn't it. It was Frisco. "Frisco!" the message said, the woman's voice oozing shock and dismay. "Frisco! In a museum!" She couldn't believe it.

It is true, though. The excellent exhibit about yacht racing on the bay uses that forbidden word several times. To high church San Franciscans, this is blasphemy.

But not to Richard Everett, the curator of exhibits at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. He thinks Frisco is a good fit for a city that grew up on the waterfront, but then got so self-important that it turned its back on the sailors, longshoremen, saloon keepers, crimps and lowlifes who built the city.

"I'm trying to put the word back," he said. "It has been in jail too long."

Everett did research. He found that when San Francisco really was a port, every salty dog called it Frisco. It was an affectionate nickname. Jack London wrote about the "Frisco Kid," Woody Guthrie called it Frisco in his 1941 "Ballad of Harry Bridges."

"I am of Frisco ... the foghorns, the ocean, the hills, the sand dunes, the melancholy of the place. I love this city," William Saroyan wrote once.

His play, "The Time of Your Life," was set in a waterfront saloon. And it won a Pulitzer.

However, Everett said, the real San Franciscans, the ones that counted, looked down on the waterfront and its denizens. "It was a place to avoid," he said. "Full of low-brow, Barbary Coast types."

In the haze of nostalgia, the old waterfront was colorful, but there were years of strikes and tough guys, many of them wearing black Frisko jeans.

Herb Caen, who wrote the book on San Francisco - several of them, in fact - put it this way in 1953: "Don't call it Frisco. It's SAN Francisco, because it was named after St. Francis of Assisi. And because 'Frisco' is a nickname that reminds the city uncomfortably of its early, brawling, boisterous days and the cribs and sailors who were shanghaied and because 'Frisco' shows disrespect for a city that is now big and proper and respectable, and because only tourists call it 'Frisco' anyway and you don't want to be taken for a tourist, do you?" But Caen himself recanted several times, most notably in 1993: "Adolescence is believing that 'Frisco' is a racy nickname for a city; senility is automatically saying 'don't call it Frisco,' maturity is figuring it doesn't matter all that much ... "

Friscophobes like to turn up their provincial noses at Frisco, Texas, and movies like "Hello, Frisco, Hello"- which won an Oscar by the way. They used to point with pride to the Don't Call It Frisco coin laundry on Hayes Street, but it folded. So forget Frisco.

A new menace is on the horizon - San Fran. You hear young people talking about San Fran all the time, drawing scowls from old people. "So, you going to San Fran?" an airline agent asked a friend of mine. "Certainly not," he said. "I'm going to San Francisco."

Just this week I heard a radio commercial talking about San Fran. And billboards all over town advertising something called "San Fran-savings".

So maybe the war is lost. "San Fran" does sound a little better than "Cali," which is the new name for California. The Golden State basketball team can be rebranded as the Cali Warriors. It has a certain ring to it. Or clunk.

"It's a nickname," he said, "and nicknames are affectionate. You only give someone a nickname if you like them, right?" Think of Jack Kennedy, his brother Ted, and legions of people called Bud, and Sonny, Jenny, and Betty, and even Mouse.

So good-bye Frisco, hello San Fran. It won't be easy.

"Like all things new, it represents change," said Everett. "A lot of people don't like change."

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